Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will now present my case that leadership is a form of mental illness. To begin, let's divide the leaders of the world into two groups: friends and enemies. Please forgive me for taking a U.S.A.-centric approach in this argument, as it is just for simplicity. In Exhibit One, we note that the leaders of countries we consider enemies are undeniably bat-spit crazy. Kim Jong-il: crazy midget Ahmadinejad: crazy holocaust denier Khadafy: designs his own hats The list of crazy enemy leaders is long:...

I missed the story about Warren Beatty’s 18-year-old daughter planning to have a sex-change operation. Beatty’s wife, Annette Bening, apparently canceled many of her appearances related to the movie The Kids Are All Right when it opened this summer because of her own family issues. Bening is said to be supporting her daughter; Beatty himself is distraught and opposed to his daughter’s decision. I could have read this in the New York Post’s Page Six a few weeks ago, but I missed it. The Post could have picked this up from the National Enquirer...

The biggest fight in politics is between the norm and something else. There’s official, socialized, dress-for-success, acceptable manners, know-all-the-right-people stuff, and then there’s the other—the uncouth. There’s Andrew Cuomo and then there’s Carl Paladino. The latter is a rude, nasty, semi-literate seeming buffoon. The former has, at various points in his career, been considered rude and nasty, but never a buffoon. Now he is smooth and controlled. In fact, one of his big career accomplishments is to have become smooth and controlled. So it must...

And her name is Maribel. Some three weeks ago, I made an appointment with Comcast to have a broken DVR replaced. I took off from work and came home to sit during my assigned 3-hour “service window." During the window I called to see if they were running late, as they have so often. They told me that the appointment had been canceled because I had not answered a call to reconfirm the appointment made to my home phone prior to the service window time. They were unapologetic and told me that the soonest period I could be rescheduled for was 4-5 days later, a Sunday, with a service...

Here's your next billion-dollar Internet startup idea. If it sounds like the dumbest idea in the world, remember that you didn't think of Twitter. That will keep you humble enough to get through this post. Imagine a web site that allows any adult to post a ten-second video that is nothing but a statement of opinion, showing only the speaker's face. The opinion could be anything from "Diet Coke tastes better than Diet Pepsi" to a political preference. The web site would sort the opinions into as many categories as needed. Visitors to the site would be able to vote on the videos, based...

A British banker once described for me what happened when Rupert Murdoch decided to make then-31-year-old son James the CEO of BSkyB, the UK satellite television company managed by News Corp. but in which it holds only a minority stake. (News Corp. is now trying to buy all of BSkyB.) There was a huge and predictable cry from other shareholders that Murdoch was autocratically imposing his son on the company. It was a tense moment in which the younger Murdoch might have been turned out and News Corp.’s grip on BSkyB loosened. But then Rupert started working the phones—one of his...

Luck, power, sheer fortitude, and a brilliant network of partisans and flunkies are the elements that protect the rich and powerful from being brought down by the large and small crimes that have made them rich and powerful, or by the ironies and poetic justice that inevitably level them, too. Nobody has had more luck, power, and fortitude, nor has put together a greater network of the cowed and owing than Rupert Murdoch. He has survived near-bankruptcy, countless business blunders of staggering proportions, a kidnapping attempt, a messy personal life, and, as well, one of the most counterintuitive...

The conventional wisdom of this year’s politics has been that the wealthy, rather en masse, were going to buy their place in Congress and in state houses around the country. This is the Michael Bloomberg effect. But the poor and shiftless are doing very well, too. Christine O’Donnell, the surprise winner of the Republican Senate primary in Delaware, earned $5,800 this year and defaulted on her mortgage, the New York Times reports. Curiously, one positive argument about wealthy candidates—again, it’s the Michael Bloomberg argument—has been that...

“Every leading Delaware Republican knows that Christine O'Donnell is way out of the mainstream,” is how her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, happily analyzed the Senate primary victory of the Tea Party-supported, and anti-masturbation, candidate O’Donnell. Well, that’s the question: What’s the mainstream? It does seem that everybody, including Karl Rove, believes that the Palin-backed O’Donnell isn’t in it. But how far out of it is she? Rick Lazio, himself rather far from the theoretical mainstream of New York voters, but an uncontroversial...

I’m sorry, as you might have noticed, I just can’t get enough of the U.K.-Murdoch phone hacking story. For one thing, Rupert Murdoch is as up against it as he ever has been, save for the moment in the early 1990s when he almost went broke. For another, it touches that most sensitive spot of any UK politician or journalist, many of whom I’m pleased to call my friends: just what exactly they owe Murdoch or fear about him. Nobody for so long has so much pervaded and colored and upended the media and politics of Britain as has Murdoch. In politics and media and Britain,...

OFF THE GRID is about why the news is the news. Here are the real motivations of both media and newsmakers. Here's the backstory. This is a look at the inner workings of desperate media, the inner life of the publicity crazed, and the true meaning of the news of the day.